I'm all booked out! (continued)

The year before, when "Feet 1" was ready to meet its readers, I had suddenly found that there was a horrible problem with the "online gallery of almost 2000 photos". Having been a user of Flickr for several years, it was to me the obvious medium for hosting the pictures I'd selected to accompany the book. Putting it all together had been pretty time-consuming, but I thought it was well worth it. There was no way I could add even half the photos to the pages of the book itself; it would have made it huge. And anyway, a lot of Kindle readers have devices which only display black on white. Furthermore, what other ebook had used the web in this way? I was a pioneer in the field, surely!

Except that Flickr wasn't having it. I was using (still am) the free version, and this has the nasty habit of putting large adverts up on the screen whilst you're browsing the photos. I didn't know that, because I have an ad-blocker on my laptop, and that... blocks the ads! I only discovered that this was happening when I chanced to look at the gallery as if I were a reader, and I used Grace's laptop for that. She doesn't have an ad-blocker. I was horrified, mortified, and bloody annoyed with myself!

There was nothing I could do short of postponing publication, and I couldn't do that because of all the promotion I'd been doing on social media over the previous couple of months. A lot of people knew about it, and they were expecting to hear that it was ready to buy (even if they weren't going to buy it themselves), and I was going to look like a total plonker for failing. All I could do was put an apology on the first screen of the gallery, promising that I would find a better host for my photos as soon as I could. There were several other possibilities rattling around in my mind, though the same mind was quaking at the thought of the enormousness of the task ahead.

To cut a long story a bit shorter... There was no other web-based solution that met all of my criteria for presenting my photos. So then, of course, I would have no suitable way to do it for "Moving home..." either. This was my art-stopping problem. It had been hanging over me for almost a year. I just had to crack this one!

And, thank God, I did!

I smacked my head when it dawned on me that I had worked on Blogger in the writing of two blogs over the past twelve years, yet I'd not considered using it for the books' photo galleries! Picking myself up off the floor, I quickly set to work building them; first for "Moving home...", which was the easier proposition, and then for "Life with...", which took far, far longer because of the need to re-select from my thousands of photos on my computer exactly the same ones and in exactly the same order as those in Flickr. (My heart had leapt when I discovered I could download the whole lot from Flickr. It sank to previously uncharted depths when I discovered that it had no concept of order whatsoever! I deleted the account in disgust.) Back to the originals...

Regardless of the mind-numbing time it took to do these, the result in Blogger was very pleasing indeed. I hope you readers agree with me! Now I could get both books published.

It wasn't long before "Moving home..." got its first review - Towpath Talk again, bless them!

But this is a story of four parts. The first part actually started back in the late 1980s, and it's only just finished. But it'll have to wait for another day to be told.

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